This Could Be The First Drone-Proof City

Asher J. Kohn, a law student and conceptual artist, has come up
with a novel idea.

If we
built communities designed to counter surveillance and
targeted drone strikes, then all the new and upcoming, super
expensive drones would be worthless hunks of metal.

Kelsey Atherton of Popular Science describes "Shura
City" basically as a possible end to the current, and for the
foreseeable future, preferred means for often
unaccountable leaders to wage war.

From PopSci:

[Shura City's] design [is] for the warfare of our
time, in which the United States favors sending robots, over
people, to hunt down small groups or individuals.

Kohn imagines a few simple ideas aimed at
preventing a "lock" on target. Just about any American has
watched an episode of cops where infrared technology helped
police find that elusive night-time runner — well Kohn's
design renders drones blind.

Borrowed from designs in the Netherlands, it's covered in a
lattice like irregular
pattern, and then filled with a cloudy Plexiglas like
cutouts. The 'roof' structure allows for temperatures to be "cool
in the summer, warm in the winter," blocking IR robot
sight.

"The effect is no different from
walk-ing into a dark room on a sunny day,"
writes Kohn.

Residents could also attach LEDs to the roof,
pointing skyward, making night strikes all but impossible.

The housing architecture
itself is borrowed from the bizarre design of Canada's
"Habitat 67." via
Flickr

The famed housing structure is a hodgepodge of squares,
rectangles and jutting rooms. Again, the jumbled design doesn't
fit into the idea of modern cultural housing, where
identification of bedrooms, bathrooms and common areas is
relatively easy.

Kohn goes on to describe multicolor windows
that have changing patterns like the ones seen on billboards that
switch ads as the viewer's perspective changes. He even quips
that resident hackers could build QR Codes into the
windows, ordering drones to crash themselves.

In Kohns own words:

The goal is not defense-through-hardening, but
defense-through-confusion. By turning the
entire community into a closed circuit, drones targeting individuals will not be able to
select and detect the individuals
they desire once they enter the city ...
creating an empty data set turns the smart
drones into dumb-bombs ...
this built environment presents drones
with an inscrutable puzzle.

Finally, Medieval towers or even mosque-like minarets would then
keep low-flying drones from flying too low — and several
"Badgirs," a type of ventilation and observation tower of
Iranian
design which sucks in and circulates air throughout the
whole complex.

The defense, though passive, would force
aggressors into intimate contact with their supposed targets,
through either overt and covert "manual" contact — in other
words, its passivity forces more aggressive means.

and located, and either assassinated literally by hand, or raided
by teams through "boots on the ground" tactics — something
America is increasingly politically unwilling to
do. So-called "manual"
contact is incredibly complex, costly and time consuming.

The other option is to turn the city into a
parking lot with heavy munitions, something the international
community is unlikely to condone.

The word Shura comes from Arabic, meaning
"consultation."
In certain contexts it means a gathering of leaders or elders in
a political, or social planning type of context.

The original language of the Koran is in Arabic,
and the overwhelming number of human targets of drone strikes are
Muslims. Needless to say, they're rarely, if ever, "consulted"
prior to launch of these strikes.